By Melanie Lekocevic
Capital Region Independent Media
RAVENA — Got a sweet tooth? Then Crosstown Maple on New York’s Maple Weekend is the place for you.
Crosstown Maple on Blodgett Hill Road was one of 29 maple producers from Albany to Westchester counties to showcase their business in an open house on Maple Weekend this Saturday and Sunday. If you missed it, don’t fret — they’re planning on doing it all over again this coming weekend, on March 29 and 30.
Kevin Reinisch, owner of Crosstown Maple, has been in the maple production business for the past 13 years, and says Maple Weekend gives local producers a chance to showcase their wares.
“March is Maple Month — not everyone knows where maple syrup comes from,” Reinisch said. “It’s nice that this is a local place that people can come and check it out and see what we do here.”
Crosstown Maple leases around 100 acres from several landowners and taps about 2,500 trees to make its maple syrup, candies, barbecue sauces and other maple products.
“We take the sap from the tree, bring it inside and process it using an evaporator,” Reinisch said. “It boils off the water from the sap to make syrup.”
Maple sap is mostly water, so you need a lot of it to make syrup.
“Sap is 98% water and 2% sugar, and we need to reduce that down to 66% brix, which is the sugar content, to make it legal syrup,” he said.
It takes more sap to make the syrup that you spread on your breakfast pancakes than you likely think. Using the sap from Reinisch’s trees, it takes 60 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of maple syrup.
But what ends up on your table is full of sugary goodness.
“We don’t add anything to it, we just boil off the water, so it’s all natural,” Reinisch said.
Once processed, the syrup is used to make a wide range of products, from maple syrup for your waffles to barbecue sauces, maple cream, maple candies, infused syrups, maple cotton candy and maple doughnuts.
Reinisch got started in the business by happenstance.
“My son was two years old and we went to the library and there was a book there on maple syrup,” he said. “We had two trees in the backyard and that’s how we got started. Somebody asked if they could buy syrup off me and one thing led to another. I got access to some land, and it has taken off from there.”
How is a tree tapped? A hole is drilled into the tree trunk and a spout is inserted to draw the sap out and into tubing, which is then collected and the water evaporated.
Maple production is heavily dependent on the weather, and this year, things got off to a later than usual start at Crosstown Maple.
“We usually start in mid-February but this year we didn’t tap until March 7 because it was so cold,” Reinisch said. “The weather has a lot to do with it — it has to warm up during the day and drop below freezing at night.”
If you missed this past weekend’s open house, you can still get a look at Crosstown Maple’s operation and try out their products this coming weekend. Another open house will be held on March 29 and 30, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at Crosstown Maple’s sugar shack, located at 533 Blodgett Hill Road.
